


RE:FRAG - Ghost of a Memory

by SuperSecretAgentQrow



Category: RWBY
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, F/M, Memory Alteration, Qrowin Week 2018
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-23
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-05-27 04:36:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15016808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuperSecretAgentQrow/pseuds/SuperSecretAgentQrow
Summary: They asked me how much the truth is worth in Lien. I asked them to go to hell.





	1. Chapter 1

They say you never understand someone until you walk a mile in their shoes. A lot of people would kill to spend a day in the shoes of my brother Whitley. He had everything a kid could ask for - the best clothes you could buy in The Remnant, luxury meals served in the highest terraces in the city, a psychip that never bugged out or short-circuited, a father that openly liked him more than either of his sisters...

Yes, people would straight up _murder_ to be in Whitley’s shoes without batting an eye.

Right now I was watching his neon sneakers soak up the blood from the floor, finding the irony a little on the nose and fighting the urge to puke as my chief rolled the recording. The Outer Heaven condo’s owner had a hidden camera installed to spy on guests, but I doubt he thought it’d be quite so useful.

_Red like roses_

“I thought it best to show this to you personally,” Commissioner Ironwood said across the desk, hands folded like whenever he was dealing with the shittiest of shit situations (which was most of the time in this hellhole). “The superintendent who saw what was happening immediately called the police, and the dispatcher delegated this to our Special Operations Division. I made sure to extract the file from the building database, so what you’re seeing is the only footage of what happened that night.”

I barely heard Ironwood, coming to terms with the holographic video of my brother smashing two men to a pulp with a golf club. The typical smug prick expression he wore was replaced with a snarl the likes of which I hadn’t seen since my days hunting splicer mob bosses, as if the men he was beating to death had called mother a whore and as if Whitley gave a fuck about our mom.

_Red like roses_

By the time he ran out of breath you could’ve made soup out of the first guy, and a comfy pillow stuffing from the second. Whitley sniffed the air like a bloodhound, whirling to face the camera tucked in the ceiling. Those baby blue eyes of his nearly burst their veins, his iris a shade of red that would’ve been pretty if not so terrifying. What happened to the toddler who laughed when I held him upside down all those years ago?

_Redlikerosesredlikerosesredlikeroses_

 _STOP!_

I found out a second later as he charged the camera, screaming something nonsensical as his golf club swung into me. I flinched back as the feed zipped out. “That’s where the recording ends,” Ironwood sighed.

I fought for control, desperate not to break my boss’s table with my steel left hand a second time in a colorful police career. My autonomous heart implant was able to keep up with ten minutes of sprinting straight, but it was having trouble preventing a heart attack at this moment. I settled for bending over and exhaling the vilest string of curses I could think of.

One deep breath. Two deep breaths. _You’re a Schnee, so act like it_.

“Commissioner, why are you showing me this?” I asked. “You could’ve resolved this before I came in to work today. I could have found out after you locked him up.”

It was when the cases hit close to home that Ironwood looked oldest, like that time a triad bomb hit a little girl his niece’s age point-blank, or when my father pretended to be abducted to fool his business rivals. “I showed you this because eventually you were going to find out. I’ve never had an operative who finds the truth of things the way you do, Winter.”

I ignored the praise. I needed the truth. “You have to know what caused this. My brother’s an asshole, sure, but he isn’t a cold-hearted killer. He refuses to even sully himself with the rain, let alone blood.”

The Commissioner tapped his interface and a model of a long metallic smoking rod came up. “According to crime scene analysis, Whitley and the two victims spent about an hour on these Dream Pipes. A prototypal hallucinogenic cigarette brought to you by the virtuous Torchwick Enterprises, untested and runner-up for most unethical project of the year. They make use of a pool of memory fragments and a controversial cavity in the psychip gateway to mix your mind with whatever memories are stored in the Dream Pipe, giving you a ‘high so strong your head, limbs, and dick will be blown right off,’ according to one early advocate who died a week later.”

“It’s like a handheld dream salon,” I whispered.

“It’s similar, but not quite the same,” the Commissioner said. “At a dream salon there are neural walls in place to tether your mind against whatever simulation you’re diving into. There’s someone checking on you to make sure you’re not in a deep dive for more than thirty minutes. There are rules and regulations to make sure something like this doesn’t happen.”

“A Dream Pipe lets you take a dive wherever and whenever you want.”

“Exactly. Whitley probably thought he was only in there for about a minute or two, but from perceptive time dilation it had been an hour of living someone else’s life before he started to become affected. By that time it was too late for the other two, who were just as high out of their minds and could only sit there while he beat the life out of them.”

I reeled in my chair. Where was Whitley now? What would my father think? What would Weiss? No one would look at my brother the same way again. He’d gone from favorite of the richest man in The Remnant to both sim junkie and killer in a night.

“Commissioner Ironwood,” I said, knowing this was as hard for him as it was for me, “while I understand Whitley wasn’t in full control of his faculties, the fact is that he _murdered_ those two men that night. He alone is responsible for taking the pipe and should face the consequences, for the greater good of The Remnant.”

Ironwood sighed, looking like the man who held the key to life and death - and he did, at this very moment, hold the key to my brother’s. Just as justice had to be blind, it had to be deaf to the pleas for second chances or mercy. “I had a feeling you would say that, Special Operative.”

He tapped the computer once to bring up the murder holofile and a second time to delete it, watching the video evaporate with all the evidence of Whitley’s rampage.

I shot out of my seat, grabbing at the air as if I could drag the file out of digital hell. Ironwood held the key to that file’s life too and he’d thrown it away. “No. No! Commissioner Ironwood, how could you -”

“Special Operative Schnee, sit down. That’s an order.” It sounded like it hurt him almost as much as it devastated me.

“You can’t - you - this isn’t fair! Whitley can’t get a pass on brutal murder just because he’s -”

“Whitley _has_ to get a pass on this accident because of your father, Winter. Incarcerating a Schnee will bring down this entire police force faster than the Brotherhood of Fangs could ever hope to. I can’t afford to risk this. I’m sorry.”

“If we hide this hundreds will keep dying to Torchwick’s pipes! Whitley’s not a god, he’s just another rich prick from the Inner Kingdom!”

“He’s the son of the most powerful man in The Remnant!” my chief roared, shattering the glass screen with his prosthetic fist. “Believe me, if it were anyone else I would have them hanging from Torchwick’s headquarters for a week to spread the message. Earning your father’s ire simply isn’t an option, and I won’t risk the security of my city to lock up one criminal.” He brought his human left arm to the other side of his head, reaching for the psychip that hummed a fiery red. His face contorted in pain before he relaxed, his neural chip returning to its default ice blue color. “That is all. I wanted to tell you that the case is closed. You are dismissed, Special Operative Schnee.”

I stayed seated in my chair, crossing my legs as if I could convey how pissed off I was with a simply change in posture. “What about the people who saw this? What are you going to do about them?” I said acidly.

Ironwood ignored my tone, which I appreciated since under normal circumstances I would’ve been mortified to speak to my superior officer like that. “I’ve already subject-wiped all witnesses, including the officers who responded to the original emergency call that night.”

“What about me? Are you going to wipe **me** as well?”

My boss winced. Deep down I knew this wasn’t fair to him, but I just needed something to bite my frustration into, and being a bitch was better than breaking his things. “I know it goes against Special Operations policy, but...I’m going to avoid tampering with your memory in this case. You deserve the right to decide what you’ll do with that knowledge.”

He got up and walked to his window, peeling back the blinds to reveal the shining adverts and Bullhead traffic painting the foggy sky. “A word to the wise, Winter,” he said with his back facing me. “There was a time when I believed you could brute force order into this city with a stun baton and a rulebook. Lawless Outer Rings, Inner Kingdom company mobsters...I thought nothing was above the rule of law, and that bringing in bad men would bring out the good in our city. That was before I was cornered by corporate thugs and lost half my body in an empty alleyway.” He paused as a distant spray of gunfire tore from the streets below. “I admire the dedication you have to protecting the people who live here, really. If half the force had the conviction you did we might make real progress - an arms clan here, a domestic sector there. But for every inch of progress we make we pay for it in a mile of our blood. I’m not going to sacrifice the lives of my men and women for the sake of an unachievable dream.”

He glanced back at me. “Just promise me, Winter. Promise me that you’ll accept that some things must be done for the greater good, alright?”

I stood up. I didn’t smile, I didn’t frown. I didn’t look him in the eye. That’s how he knew I couldn’t make that promise.

“Commissioner Ironwood, sir,” I said, saluting once before letting myself out of his office.

_Red like roses fills my dreams and takes me to the place you rest..._

I slammed my fist into the side of my skull, desperate for quiet inside my head. To think that they called this psychip model best thing a person could buy...

I could feel eyes on me as I stormed to the elevator. The rest of the force watched me go by, some outright jumping out of my way lest they face the wrath of Special Operative Schnee. They might not know what we’d been talking about, sure, but they could come up with their own theories behind my back. Theories that would give way to rumors. Maybe a secret mission for the chief's favorite specialist. Perhaps another promotion for Daddy Schnee’s bright snowflake. Even a big blowjob for the biggest Irondick in the force. Gossip flowed through the office like blood flowed through gang turf alleys.

Fuck justice. I needed a drink.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, this week has been rough. This was supposed to be done like two days ago as a one-shot, but between exams and the rest of Qrowin Week I didn't have it in me to post it all at once. Still, excited to try something new and grittier, hope you guys like it.  
> Leave a kudo and a comment if you can it's much appreciated ^^


	2. Chapter 2

Junior’s Bar was a proud startup establishment, at least if you read the public tax records. In reality, the ex-contract killer ran a bustling and successful business for, with, and by criminals. There was a hitman with a fruity martini polishing his sniper barrel on his lap by the window, a corporate scammer losing a dozen rounds of netjack to a little girl with a giant pocket knife, even a wasted junkie snorting pink powder off an android pair of tits romantically. Normally I’d have my work cut out for me arresting all of these tools at once, but instead I just sighed and kept my eyes facing the wall of bottles in front of me.

Junior didn’t bother turning around to greet me, flipping bottles back on their shelves at a mile a minute. He would’ve cut a handsome figure if he just ditched the black mohawk and telescoping copper eyes that served no purpose indoors. And his shit beard too.

“So, the special op is deep undercover again, is she?” he grumbled while he polished a pink glass, sizing up my current city camouflage of ripped jeans and stained white shirt I covered with a frayed brown cloak. “What brings you around this time? You tailing Mike Malevolence and his new railrifle to see if he’ll lead ya to his hired gun hideout? Maybe on the lookout for Marty O’Hagan’s Cloud 99 crack dealer? Pretty slow night, so I’m sure most of the patrons would appreciate a good old-fashioned cop throwdown.”

“Will you shut up,” I hissed at him, “someone might overhear you and then I’d actually have to **do** something about the two dozen wanted criminals hiding out in your mancave. How many times do I have to tell you I’m just here for a drink?”

He tossed the glass over his shoulder, letting the robotic arm hanging from the ceiling catch it. “Feh, that’s the same thing you told me before you tore that ‘Capts scummer’s middle finger off a while back.” He rolled his protruding eyes when I raised an eyebrow, daring him to list off more incriminating evidence. He was lucky special operatives weren’t subject to routine memory scans, or I’d have put him out of business long ago. “Never mind then. What’ll it be, stranger?”

That was more like it. I tossed him some Lien and threw my ratty hood at the sentient robotic arm locked to the bar, which whined angrily. “Just a usual Smuggler’s Getaway for me. Make it two, actually.” I’d have a killer headache tomorrow, but at least I wouldn’t have to think about my killer brother for a while.

Junior set to work and I fiddled around on my scroll, swiping away all the news feeds of my father’s latest acquisition and the mysterious death of its former CEO. I’d spent a few weeks trying to walk the fine line between cop and Schnee insider and I’d nearly thrown myself off a building three times. Ignorance sure was bliss between work and family.

“This seat open?” drawled a husky voice from my left. I nodded without even looking at him, not in the mood for pesky company. “Perfect,” he said as he slid onto the stool beside me.

I whirled to face him. “I said it was taken, asshole!” Was everyone just trying to make my day somehow shittier?

The red-eyed man laughed as I recognized him. “Sure is now. Good ta see you again too, Ice Queen.” He sized me up, humming approvingly. “I dig the new look, super secret agent. If it wasn’t for that Schnee-brand white hair without a speck of dirt gracin’ it, you could almost blend in here.”

I flipped him off. “Fuck you, Qrow. Not in the mood for your stupid game of try my patience.”

“Relax, I ain’t here to cause trouble tonight,” he said as he uncapped his wood-framed flask and taking a slow drag. “Just had a feeling our resident disillusioned cop might need a drinking buddy tonight and hey, drinking is one of my top five marketable talents.”

_Well, I’ll certainly drink to that, Ice Queen_

 _chink_

Echoes, echoes...one of these days I was going to pull that piece of junk from my brain.

Qrow and I had met...somewhere, I was just blanking on where _exactly_ at the moment. Regardless, he was your usual jack of all trades outlaw, employing what he called his 'professional skills' to lie, hack, and occasionally tip off reporters that notorious mercenaries were hunting them down when they posted incriminating corporate profiles. A real zero-sum scoundrel with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

It’s what made being around him so frustrating. Why did I bother associating with him? What even drove me to talk to a know-nothing criminal, the sort that came a dime a dozen in this damned city?

Maybe it was his sense of humor, black enough to have the dead rolling in their unmarked graves and make me snort my liquor. Maybe it was his admirable body, tall and lean with surprisingly few augmentations save for the odd shoulder support bolt and his titanium left arm, as well as two black grooves on each side of his face. It might’ve been his eyes, red like captivating rivers of blood and whirring with a constant stream of data just beyond what I could see...

He tapped my nose. “Ice Queen? You still in there? Thought you told me it was rude ta stare.”

Ugh. Back to being a cybernetically-enhanced dick. I turned away from him in my seat, hoping he wouldn’t see the obvious heat in my cheeks. “And it’s rude to interrupt someone’s antisocial time! Go be a douche somewhere else tonight, Qrow, I’m liable to do more than just arrest you tonight.”

Junior set my two drinks on the counter and slid them down to me. A welcome distraction, I reached out for - “Hey! I paid for those, you stupid - rrgh!”

Qrow had caught both the glasses before they could reach me, holding one in each hand as he turned to face me with a shit-eating grin. “I knew that much. Figured you could pay for first round tonight and lemme treat you the rest.”

“Why would I waste what little time I have away from work to humor you?”

“Well, I know fer a fact that venting about your job makes living it a little easier. Especially when family starts getting involved in police cases.”

I stared at him, almost ready to pull out my tiny blaster pistol on him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, and you’d avoid pushing my buttons if you knew what’s good for you.”

He shrugged, swirling the drinks slowly. “Alright then, what would you say we go get a drag of a _Fantasy Pipe_ or two?”

In an instant I grabbed his human arm and twisted it behind his back. A few heads turned at me, but mostly because everything else was boring and not because they wanted to intervene. “No one in the city was supposed to know about that, not even my fucking **father**. So tell me where you got your info and I’ll make sure you don’t get shot on the way to PD,” I hissed in his ear.

He rolled his eyes at me - what, did he not think I could toss him over my shoulder and tear off his legs with my one robotic hand? “Relax, if you think I just hacked into the police dataframe when you guys were watching footage you can rest easy. Just heard about a strange double murder in Outer Heaven from a friend, so I sifted through the security video until I found where something was cut. Saw where yer brother was an hour or two before the ‘accident’ and I figured out the rest from there.”

Damn him, now I couldn’t bring him in for a felony charge, since hacking a domestic database was typically fair game if they didn’t hire a good enough netguard. “That’s almost impressive for a common criminal. How about you tell me more on a walk downtown?”

He laughed out loud, taking an obnoxious sip of **my** drink and setting the glass down, even while I stretched his right arm to the breaking point. “Hah, if you think I’m gonna fall for that one you’ll have ta try again. Attitude was a nice touch, though.”

I growled, twisting just a little further before releasing him and sitting back down. He rolled his neck and popped his shoulder back into place casually. “Regardless of your intentions,” I seethed, “you’re still in possession of classified police data. I can’t leave a random crook with knowledge of a closed murder case.”

He giggled, partly from the pain and partly from the drink (Smuggler’s Getaway had a way of doing that). “That so? What happened to getting away from work at the outlaw bar? Would be pretty hard to explain where you found me, wouldn’t it Ice Queen?”

“...”

I turned away from him with a huff, planting my cheek on my iron palm and muttering something about him still being a dick even if I wasn’t going to take him in at this moment.

Qrow snickered and slid the other glass of liquor towards me. “Hey, I thought you might want someone to vent to over a drink or three. Something about this case has you all worked up, and I bet I can nail it in three guesses.”

I glared at him from behind my bangs, swiping the drink brusquely and throwing it back. I felt it course through my throat and rattle the device hooked to my brain, muddying the small HUD permanently in the corner of my iris. _Needed that one_. “I can assure you, no matter how I feel about it, the case is staying closed. Whitley will stay free, and like it or not the situation will remain unchanged.”

Qrow nodded. “Alright, so what yer telling me is there’s nothing left you can do,” he reasoned as he finished off his glass. “If that’s the case, why bother keeping the memory frag any longer? You could have put this whole mess behind ya by now and be piss-drunk instead of drunk and pissed.”

I pointed with my thumb at Marty over my shoulder, who was sitting dumbly and smiling dumber now that his game of tit and powder was over. “See the prick in the yellow armchair? He ran out of Lien for crack and switched to selling his own frags to pay his dealer.That was three or four cycles ago.”

Qrow winced as the junkie stumbled out of his seat and took another hit from on the floor, oblivious to the fact that he’d gone twice over the overdose point today. “Looks like he’s reaping the rewards of that transaction. Guy looks like he barely remembers the day or even his name.”

“Precisely. It’s just, from what I’ve seen every time you give up a frag you lose a piece of yourself. Do you know what it’s like to live as part of who you used to be?”

_White is cold and always yearning burdened by a_

I clutched my forehead weakly, waving off Qrow’s fake concern as I shook off the confusion. Hadn’t had these infuriating echos in my head for cycles and they chose now of all times to manifest? Stupid shitty psychip, stupid shitty case, stupid shitty Qrow...

He was still giving me this funny almost-concerned look when I glanced back at him, almost as if he wanted to say something charming but wasn’t willing to risk another bout with police brutality. “It’s - it’s nothing,” I mumbled. “Just my...chip being a pain.”

“Don’t you have the latest model?” he asked offhandedly. “I hardly get bugs with mine and I basically built it myself. What sort of bugs are you...?”

“Nothing. I told you already, it’s not a big deal and it’s none of your concern.”

“Uh-huh.” My ‘drinking buddy’ seemed distracted, staring into the empty glass in his metal hand as if he could count the drops left for him to lap up.

We sat in silence for a bit, him content to stare at his glass absently and me glad to have shut him up. “Isn’t it weird?” he said randomly.

Well, that was short-lived. “Isn’t what weird?”

“The case. Does it feel totally suspicious to you?”

“If you’re going to sit here and make bold drunk conjectures about drug-induced murders I’ll just call it quits right now,” I said as I grabbed my cloak and stood up.

A silvery-steel hand gripped my wrist and threw me back into my chair. “Just, hear me out Ice Queen.” When Junior’s back was turned Qrow reached over the counter and grabbed a whole bottle of King Taijitu, pouring a full glass for both of us. Well, it’d be a shame to refuse a good drink so long as **he** was paying for it.

“Think critically here. Whitley’s a rich kid first and a bored one second, so of course sooner or later he’s gonna run into rich people toys and have ‘imself a good time. But you got any idea how long Fantasy Pipes’ve been listed on the market?”

I grumbled, but humored his pointless speculation. “Easy, they’ve never _been_ on the market. Torchwick couldn’t get medical approval for legal sale of the device, so he set aside a staff to act as distributors of the product unofficially. Like most luxury neurosimulants, Fantasy Pipes are probably found exclusively in the Outer Heaven and Inner Kingdom sectors, where about all the money in The Remnant is.”

“Fair enough. So it’s reasonable to think Whitley had people lining up around yer old Schnee Überpalace to provide for the pasty-faced prince. Now, how many cases have you heard of a neurosimulant user going berserk?”

I searched through my memory for case files I’d skimmed through. “Almost...none. There are plenty of hypersteroid junkies overdoing their dosages and accidentally crushing a sparring partner’s spine, and a few dozen fatal dream salon seizures happen every cycle, but Fantasy Pipes or other such drugs have almost never been linked to a death more than coincidentally.”

“Which means either Whitley is randomly one of the first victims of a viral violent memory sample in the whole pool of fragments in a Fantasy Pipe - which would mean there would have been another twenty deaths by today - or someone manipulated the datastream Whitley was gonna see that night.”

I nearly shattered the glass in my iron hand, my mind going a mile a minute at the implications. “A...a setup? Who would frame a boy like Whitley..?”

“Whitley’s more than any ordinary kid fer the same reason you aren’t an ordinary cop. Your daddy has a tenth of the city on his payroll and would **kill** if he found out somethin’ like this happened to his favorite heir.”

_burdened by a royal test_

My head swam and it wasn’t just the drinks and the echoes. “But - my father won’t find out about this, the Commissioner and I made sure of that! Tragic murder aside, that renders whatever scheme this is about pointless.”

Qrow circled the rim of his glass with a fibersteel index finger. “Not if they weren’t gunning for Papa Jack. I’m thinking this smells too much like a trap. The only people in the city who know what your brother did are him, the perps, me, yer boss Ironwood...”

The finger stopped, aimed squarely at my chest. “And you.”

Great, now he had settled for melodramatics. “You’ve got to be joking, Qrow. What could anyone want from me? I gave up all my Schnee titles years ago! I haven’t even spoken to my family in almost a year...” I added quietly. “All I am is just one of thousands of cops in this endless city.”

“Quit lying to yerself. If you were ordinary you wouldn’t have Lisa Lavender knocking on yer door every other cycle for some obscure gossip about yer mom.” He pinched the bridge of his nose with two synthetic fingers, leaving a bright red mark from his struggling motor control. “There’s no such thing as coincidences in - _ugh, this fuckin’ drink_ \- in this godsforsaken city. Something just doesn’t add up, Ice Queen, and you’re in the middle of it.”

A pistol cocked behind our backs. “Yer damn right it doesn’t. Want a medal before I blow yer brains out?”

We rolled our eyes in tandem and set our glasses down. I turned my head slowly, curious about what kind of moron pulled a gun at a bar full of people who’d killed before.

Apparently it was the same kind of idiot as the one who got his fingers torn out by cops, a familiar shock of blond hair over a robot torso greeting me. “Shay Mann from the Handicapts gang? Fancy finding you here after the last time we met.”

Qrow’s face hardened. “Winter, you know this bastard?” He growled and took another sip of Taijitu when the thug shook his revolver at him.

“An old acquaintance. I’m surprised the bouncer let you get a foot in the door. Then again, you seem like the typical no-brained gangster welcomed at this establishment.”

“I resent that,” Mike Malevolence called out without even looking at the standoff happening behind him. Most of the bar, who had raised an eyebrow and the flamboyant pistol-waver, had gone back to whatever they were doing since this was going to be over within the minute. Apparently Qrow and I had a bit of a reputation.

His trigger finger was made of intricate silver, likely compensating for the fact that he’d lost it to a girl. He had half a pair of replacement eyes trained on me, his snarl exposing rotten teeth and a gold piercing on his tongue. “Winter **fucking** Schnee, hanging out in a backwater slum bar? You couldn’t find a better joke in a comic disk.”

“I resent that,” Junior said without looking up from the bottle we’d just emptied. “Hey, you gonna pay for this? I didn’t import liquid gold from the Inner Kingdom just to give it away.”

“Shaddup!” the thug hollered, aiming at the bartender for a second before correcting his mistake. “I’m in the middle of a business transaction, can’t you see? The sort of give and take our beautiful Miss Schnee would know **so well**.”

I’d enjoy castrating him after his power trip. “I don’t know if you got the memo, but I haven’t been involved in my father’s business for years. Might want to check your news before pointing that thing at anyone.”

Shay Mann gave that hideous grin again, aiming square at my face. “My boss ain’t concerned about fragging you for daddy’s business tips, sweetheart. He wants you for _you_.”

A hired gun who wasn’t here for the Schnee money? I was almost flattered.

“Coincidences again, Ice Queen, they don’t happen very often...” Qrow muttered, obviously annoyed that he was at gunpoint by association with me.

“I get it Qrow,” I hissed. “Tell me more when we’re not on the wrong end of a gun barrel.”

“So, what yer gonna do for me is come quietly with your hands where I can see em,” the shady piece of shit continued, “and I’ll make sure I don’t shoot you out of sheer joy. Man, I always wanted to take a trip to the Inner Kingdom when I was a kid. Didn’t think I’d get the chance thanks to some skinny police cunt.”

Ooh, if he wasn’t careful I he was going to need a lot more than a new pair of testicles...

“Inner Kingdom? What kind of deep-pocketed prick pays a worthless thug like you to kidnap a Schnee?” Qrow said. “The likes of us are never welcome anywhere near the damn Pearly Gates, so who the fuck’s footing your ticket to heaven?”

It looked like Qrow was using his trademark skill of being a nuisance well, since Shay Mann growled and turned the gun solely on him. “What do you care? Either way I’m gonna be the one to blow your brains out, old man.”

Qrow sighed, turning the glass upside down hoping for a drop. “Always have to play the old man card, don’t they?”

Before the crook could react Qrow’s glass shattered on his face, sending shards into his ugly face and making him scream in pain. Qrow and I dodged around the bullets he fired randomly, and in under a second my right fist and Qrow’s metal one collided with his eye sockets.

Reeling on the floor in agony, Shay Mann was disarmed and just as pitiful as he had been with a gun in hand. From the far corner of the bar Marty O’Hagan clapped gleefully (though he probably saw us wipe out a flying red dragon with magic swords considering how high he was). Junior was understandably pissed we’d broken his glass but gave us a thumbs up before telling his arm robot to fetch the dustpan.

Qrow snatched the pistol off the ground, unloading the bullet before tossing it at me. I pocketed the weapon, walking up to the moaning crook and putting a boot to his throat.

“Alright, asshole, you want to tell me who sent you or am I going to have to tear your pretty little finger off again to force it out of you? Talk.” I pressed harder when he spit on my shoe. Not about to take an attitude from the guy who almost shot me.

“Wow, looks like they don’t call you the Ice Queen for nothing,” Qrow whistled. “Look, I don’t think we’ve got time ta get what we need outta him the old-fashioned way. Whoever wants you clearly doesn’t care for subtlety or patience.”

“What do you suggest we do, then?” I said. “Dig his brain out ourselves?”

Qrow gave me a smirk that I thought made him look vaguely handsome. “More or less what I was thinking.”

_You know I love you, right?_

 _WINTER!_

He knelt down and held Shay Mann’s face with his right hand, pulling a shard of glass out of his crumpled nose. Qrow raised his synthetic arm high into the air, and with a deep breath he slammed two fingers directly into the crook’s circular chip port.

_WINTER!_

Shay spasmed violently, clawing and gurgling as Qrow struggled to hold him down. My heart beat against its metal support, threatening to tear itself apart in the madness. Now the whole bar was watching the scene, including me. I hadn’t seen anything like this, Qrow’s entire arm vibrating intensely and the almost-killer’s screams filling the room.

_SAY SOMETHING! WINTER!_

Then all at once it stopped, Qrow stumbling back on his ass and the mobster’s eyes rolling back into his bloodied head. Gods above, I thought watching my brother kill two grown men was disturbing. I hauled Qrow on his feet and he shook his head, as if trying to dispel both a hangover and a demonic possession at once.

“What the hell was that?” I asked when he seemed like he’d live. “You could’ve killed him!”

“I appreciate your concern for my well-being,” the ruffian grumbled. “And that was a fancy parlor trick I learned on a corporate job. They call it jackfragging.” He pointed at his psychip, which instead of the metallic red it normally glowed was flashing yellow. “Ran through as many significant memories from the past few days as I could, then it was a simple matter of extracting the bits I needed from our new friend.”

I glanced down at Shay Mann, whose chip was smoking and glowing weakly. “You’re saying he’s going to live after what you just did to him?”

“Let’s just say that the physical injuries will give him a helluva worse time than my brain drain. Added benefit - he won’t even remember why he came down to Junior’s.” His eyes widened and he caught himself on the counter. “Shit. This guy's head is a mess. He’s been all over the city - corporate hideout in the main sector, dance house in Outer Heaven, on a job all the way to the Outer Ring...”

“Sifting through all that will take longer than we have. Is there nothing that stands out to you? Nothing that reeks of bad guy business?”

Qrow shut his eyes to concentrate. “No, nothing I can pinpoint. Not seeing any famililar crime bosses in the past cycle or so. Starting ta wonder if this guy was just -” Qrow bolted up, eyes wide and chip blinking rapidly. “There’s a place. A place I recognize. This side of the sector, near the border with the Outer Ring.”

_White always yearning burdened test royal test royal yearning cold yearning cold_

I deftly punched my psychip again, feeling the device rattle around my frontal lobe and go silent again. Satisfied that I wasn’t going crazy yet, I fetched my cloak from Junior’s assistant bot and holstered my new pistol in a concealed pocket. “Alright then _old man_ , since you’re so keen on being a pain in my ass today, how about you lead the way?”

Qrow groaned as I shoved him towards to door. “Here I thought we were having a team bonding moment...”


	3. Chapter 3

The building we found seemed to be a dead end. For all intents and purposes it technically was the end of the city. Definitely dead.

It was a rusting three-story warehouse on the edge of the main sector, close enough to the lawless Rings that if you listened closely you could hear gunfire painting the distance. A faded WattTech insignia was burnished in the double doors than hung slightly ajar, and I couldn’t find a window that wasn’t shattered for the life of me.

_Black the beast descends from sha_

I clutched my cloak tighter around me, shaking my head of the noise and mildly regretting not going back to the department for a few heavy weapons. “You’re telling me that out of everything you found, this - **dump** is the only thing that rung a bell,” I deadpanned.

Qrow was staring at the doors as if he’d seen a ghost and jumped when I spoke. “Y-yeah, this is the one,” he said distantly. “Was a place I got to know pretty well all things considered...”

He trailed off, strangely looking ten years older for a second before he wiped his face with his steel arm and stepped up to the warehouse. “Anyways, you special operatives know how little appreciation people have for visitors out here. The sooner we find what we’re looking for the less likely we are to get shot in the back.” With that he yanked on the left handle with both hands, sliding the door open with the sickliest sound I’d ever heard a door make. A cloud of undisturbed dust was disturbed and I was glad I had my cloak while my accompl - the scoundrel lay wheezing on the ground.

Inside the abandoned warehouse was much the same. The floor was swimming in sawdust and rot, while the floor above us had too many holes for it to be considered a ceiling. I could see a fucking _toilet_ on the second level from down here.

Strange that much of the equipment in the warehouse was still here, neglected for what looked like years. My HUD lit up like a holiday display as I scanned the various items. Power tools lay on a workbench in the far corner, and there was a lounge area that looked like the waiting room for hell across from me. In the largest part of the room a variety of expensive and expired devices sat atop a round table, poch-marked with what appeared to be submachine gun rounds.

I approached the table, trying to figure out what was going on here. The gadgets on the table were no joke - a few prototypal pulse rifles with decaying fusion cells, a number of spidertech microbots from the ever-creative Arthur Watts, and on the floor underneath the table -

“A Magnopulse bomb?” I asked aloud as I picked it up. “These were never more than a prototype at Schnee Corp, and my father ultimately scrapped the project before they could be finalized...”

I turned to my associate, who was busying himself kicking dirt every which way. “Qrow, what in the world happened here? How does no one know about this?”

He knelt down, digging a large bullet coated in dry blood from the floor. “Same thing that always happens, Ice Queen. People were here, people died.”

_WINTER! STAY WITH ME, COME ON! STAY WITH ME! WINTER!_

“Not much of a story, I guess.”

Without another word he brushed past me and out of sight, leaving me to my own devices and to catch my shaking breath in my steel lungs.

I spent ten minutes scouring the warehouse for any useful clues before I gave up. My skull was pounding from a mix of overusing my iris scanner on literal garbage and too much alcohol on the job. How Qrow did anything drunk was beyond me.

I found him upstairs playing with a rudimentary commlink station hooked to a shattered screen, his open flask sitting beside a manual screwdriver. “Everything I’ve looked at here has only made things less clear,” I said. “What happened. Really.”

He refused to look in my direction, instead opening up the guts of the machine and fiddling with the wiring. “Me an’ some buddies from my old job of making a living off the rich set up base here a few years ago. Working near the Outer Ring meant cops didn’t show up that often, and corporate thugs wouldn’t think that we were robbing them blind from out here. All the way till someone tipped off the local gang. In a night everyone I thought a decent person in this damned city was dead. All that was left was me.”

_Black descends fromshadowsblackdescends_

He turned to look me in the eye, his iris somehow a shade redder than it was at the bar. “I didn’t come here to bring back unfond memories, Ice Queen. That’s what dream salons and memory frags and Fantasy Pipes are for, relivin’ the same shitty past. I’m only here to find out who wanted you an’ me shot. That’s it.”

_Black the beast descends from_

“Bullshit.” I threw the inert Schnee prototype at him, forcing him back against the console. “No ordinary thugs could get their hands on so much high-end tech without giving themselves away. Magnopulses weren’t even finished and you had three of them here waiting to cause a riot in the city.”

My breath was hot on his, and from two inches away from his face I could see the swirls of activity pooling in those grooves against his cheeks. “You’re hiding something,” I growled. “Talk. Before I try that jackfragging trick of yours myself.”

Qrow looked like a cornered animal, caught between keeping up his lie or directly disobeying me. Neither one sounded particularly pleasant and I could sympathize with him just a bit. Almost imperceptibly his hands trailed up mine, resting at my pulsing neck as his eyes bore into mine harder than I could remember anyone. I could hear them whirr mechanically, almost as if they were analyzing the deepest parts of my mind even I couldn’t reach.

“Winter, what I’m about to tell you -”

_You know I love you, right?_

The commlink flared to life before I could get my answer. The device hooked on the nearest transmitted signal and blared it through dust-sodden speakers.

“All you fucking goons in position? Sensor wire was tripped, targets are right where we want em, top of the old junk depot. Making a **grand entrance** in ten.”

A trap. It just had to be a trap.

Qrow’s face hardened, somehow combat ready with about a fifth of his blood being pure alcohol. We vaulted over the console, sprinting down the stairs that were about to get way more bullet holes than they already had. We needed to bolt before whoever was coming -

The front doors blew up across the hallway in a burst of yellow and orange flame, forcing us down further into the warehouse. They were packing serious heat that we didn’t have, just like we had no intel, no support, no discernable way out.

_Black the blacktheblacktheblackthe_

A window! I tugged Qrow hard and put my artificial heart to full use, sprinting faster than the bullets ricocheting around the corner. All that mattered was getting out of here alive.

_beast descends from shadows_

I skittered to a stop as a blur of pink and white and brown crashed through our escape. Qrow leapt in front of me, pulling out a massive chrome revolver and letting loose a full clip at the interceptor.

Every bullet bounced harmlessly off the large lace umbrella that appeared. Before we could take a step a dozen goons in matching red fanned out behind us and leveled their weapons.

We were fucked. Qrow realized it with a curse and tossed his weapon out, and I slowly raised my hands as the umbrella lifted in pure stage performance fashion.

The shieldbearer turned out to be a girl, a small one with no obvious augments at that, as colorful and frail-looking as her bulletproof umbrella. She smiled widely, oblivious to the snarl on Qrow’s face as she skipped to the center of the battered hallway, and I watched the color of her eyes shift from purple to pink to brown and back in the span of a second.

She reached behind her back, pulling out a large red-rimmed holodisk engraved with a cane. Somehow our pursuer smiled even wider, holding her hand out as the circular shape flared to life.

A two-foot tall orange hologram in a bowler hat appeared, bowing oh-so politely as two mobsters stepped towards us with vibrocuffs in hand.

“Ah, the dusty old bird and the _wonderful_ Miss Winter Schnee, ” it said in a voice that was devious and silky smooth even through the digital static. “I am SO glad you could join us this evening!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to say but there'll be a slight delay getting the rest of the chapters out. Need ta pass a class first ahehe...  
> Hope you guys are enjoying it so far! Things can only get ~~worse~~ better from here can't they?


	4. ON HIATUS

Hey everyone, sorry that I haven't come through with anything in a while! This is honestly a little late aheheh...

I wanted to make this announcement earlier, but I've been forced to go on hiatus for most of this semester. Between my job, family, and third-year engineering classes I've had to evaluate how effectively I use my time. In short, to stay afloat I need to cut everything fun from my life for the next few months - from video games to time with bae to writing...writing that I've grown to love in the short time I've been a part of this community. 

What'll hurt just as much is being unable to read the fantastic things everyone else will be posting in my time away, but at the same time I look forward to spending my entire winter break swimming in fanfics and having fun with people I love - both in my personal life, and over the many fandom discords I've been welcomed into. Rest assured that I'll keep writing chapter drafts in my time off from the site, so _hopefully_ (fingers crossed) you guys can expect not only more consistent chapters come 2k19 but **better** chapters. The creative writing class I'm taking should give me some insights on that too.

I got involved with both the general fanfic community and the RWBY fandom pretty late, but reading and interacting and just _being_ a part of this crazy group of talented and caring people warms my heart and gives me a little strength every day.

Expect to see more of my writing in late December. Thank you for your time, be safe and stay awesome \m/

SSAQ


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